Facebook Support? What Support?
by Taylor Flatt on May 7th, 2009 at 6:42 pm EDT - 993 views
As some of you may know, I still run on dial-up. Recently, Facebook switched to their new GUI and added features and “cleaned it up”. However, with the switch came many bugs that aren’t seeming to be addressed no matter how many emails I send their support staff.
First of all, I can’t even login anymore. Basically when I type in my username and pass it doesn’t load and process the attempt. This instantly told me it was a server-side script issue and nothing to do with my internet or computer. Nonetheless, I went ahead and attempted the following steps:
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5 CommentsYahoo Restructure Looming
by Taylor Flatt on February 22nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm EDT - 1,865 views
Carol Bartz, the new Chief Executive, is said to begin reconstruction of Yahoo sometime next week. From sources within Yahoo, Carol is supposedly placing a traditional structure on Yahoo much like the one she employed at Autodesk. From another prominent source,
Most expect Bartz to do a C-level style set-up, with executives like a chief operating officer, chief technology officer and also a new, more powerful chief media officer (who will also head PR), all reporting to her.
After losing many of their executives to Microsoft including Larry Heck (VP of search and advertisement sciences) and Qi Lu (VP of engineering for search and advertisement sciences), it looks like there might be a tough task ahead of Ms.Bartz.
Category: Industry News, Online
Tags: Autodesk, Carol Bartz, Google, Microsoft, Restructure, yahoo
NCSoft Gets Ready to Close Tabula Rasa
by Andrew Kao on February 18th, 2009 at 4:24 pm EDT - 646 views
The widely acclaimed Tabula Rasa will end its service on February 28th, according to the open letter distributed by the company. The company has begun distributing rewards for their other games, as well as refunding subscriptions that were paid for February and January. NCSoft had sited that the reason for closing the service was that the game had a player population of less than it had anticipated, citing a gap between real and expected revenues.
Rumors had been floating around that Tabula Rasa would be made free to the public, however with the recent events putting forth, Tabula Rasa seems to be officially closing all services. Tabula Rasa will indeed be missed by many players, however in my opinion, I think NCSoft is making the right decision to focus on their more popular games, instead of lingering on some of their dying franchises.
Microsoft’s Own ‘Easy Button’
by Nathaniel Ed on February 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm EDT - 979 views
Recently Microsoft started implementing it’s latest invention: a ‘Fix it’ button on its self help pages. It isn’t very widespread as of now, but the project is quickly gaining ground, seeing as how it started off with roughly four automatic ‘fix-its’ in December, and now it has grown to about 100 different ‘fix-its.’
To see how it worked, I decided to personally to try out this new feature. I found an easy one for me to try: The Internet Explorer icon is missing from your desktop. Upon arriving on the page, the button stuck out rather quickly. They still have manual fix instructions for Do-It-Yourselfers, but now you can automatically do it.
First of all, I put my IE icon in my recycle bin, then emptied the bin. Next, I clicked on the ‘Fix-It’ button, and a download message appeared. I chose to save the file, and an install wizard came up, so I installed the program that was designed to put an IE icon on my desktop. Next it required me to restart my computer, which I did. Then I noticed that the icon appeared without restarting my computer, but I went ahead and took the advise of the wizard and restarted my computer.
Tags: easy button, Fix-It button, help, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, support
90,000 Sex Offenders Removed From MySpace
by Joel Borhart on February 4th, 2009 at 11:44 am EDT - 763 views
On Tuesday, February 3, MySpace removed nearly 90,000 of its over 110 million users who were identified as sex offenders. MySpace is a social networking website that has drawn in a younger crowd.
Following the younger crowd is the sexual predators that lie and fake their age in order to lure in the users who are not careful. Both MySpace and Facebook are constantly trying to reduce the number of sexual predators who use their sites but it is almost impossible to root out.
Google Hacked?
by Taylor Flatt on January 31st, 2009 at 11:26 am EDT - 1,557 views
Saturday, all searches on Google resulted in errors saying the site may contain harmful material and that you should pick another website. Webmasters, including ourselves, were going crazy when we noticed this glitch. However, Google has since fixed the “glitch” and is going to be releasing an official statement soon.
There was a fault. We don’t know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved. We are still making initial enquiries
a Google spokesperson told BBC News. These kinds of “faults” are something that Google isn’t really well known for which has surprised us all. Although they have fixed it, everyone is wanting to know, What happened? Let us hope something worse doesn’t happen if they were truly hacked or if it was just a simple mistake.
Update: Google attributes the fault to human error. The error occured for about 40 minutes when Google accidently flagged all sites as dangerous. Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience had this to say, “What happened” Very simply, human error. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again”.
Source: BBC
Image courtesy of BBC
Google Earth Pot Bust?
by Nathaniel Ed on January 30th, 2009 at 10:09 pm EDT - 573 views
Apparently in Zurich, Switzerland, Swiss police were using Google’s Google Earth to find the address of a pair of farmers who were suspected of being involved in a drug ring, however, they found more about the farmers than they intended. The bust resulted in 16 arrests and 1.2 tons of marijuana confiscated [two acres worth], plus 900,000 ($775,795.19) Swiss Francs worth of valuables and cash.
I think that this is hilarious. I don’t think that having marijuana is all that bad of an offense, however it’s hilarious that the same technology that the U.S. government wants to stymie because it could compromise security, is also able to help the Swiss government. Maybe our [The United States] police force will take a hint and use this to their advantage.
Sources: MSNBC, PC World
Image courtesy of PC World.
Category: Online, Programs, Security, Software
Tags: Google, Google Earth, Switzerland
Future of Gaming – Where are we headed?
by Andreas Rothbauer on January 27th, 2009 at 9:31 pm EDT - 3,189 views
In these tough economic times when many people use the entertainment industry as an escape from the brutal reality and are looking for affordable family entertainment I thought it was time to reflect on the gaming industry and where we are going. I am sure many of you have probably grown up with the NES and other 8 bit consoles – so have I. Looking back at those days of playing the Super Marios, Zeldas and constantly blowing on the dusty cartridges to get them to work makes me miss my first gaming experiences and the epic struggle of trying to play or should I even dare say beat some of those superhard video games from the early 90s. However, I loved every minute of it and doing it with friends were some of the best times I’ve ever had.
Today, video games take on a new but just as important of a role in our lives as adults. As mentioned before, money is hard to come by in this day and age and many people don’t even have jobs anymore. Still, families are seeking entertainment and the unlikely suspect of a video game console has stepped up to deliver just that. What was once a geeky and negatively looked upon activity has spread into nearly every living room and TV show in the United States and even the entire world – newly elevated to pop-culture: the Nintendo Wii.
Category: Games, Graphic Cards, Online, Operating Systems, Programs, Reviews, Security
Tags: Future of Gaming, Gaming in the Cloud, Nintendo Wii, PS4, Steam Cloud, Xbox 720
Internet Usages Reaches Over 1 Bil
by Nathaniel Ed on January 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am EDT - 984 views
In the month of December, over one billion individual users were served worldwide. 41.3% were from the Asia-Pacific region, according to comScore, and internet traffic measurement firm.
Second place went to Europe with 28.0 percent, then North America with 18.4 percent. Latin America made up 7.4 percent, and the Middle East/Africa region made up 4.8 percent.
The statistics of actual users are: Asia/Pacific with about 416 million users, Europe had 283 million users, North America had 185 million users, Latin America had 75 million, and the Middle East/Africa had about 49 million unique users.
Country wise, China came in first with 17.8 percent, or about 180 million users, then the U.S.A. with 16.2 percent, or about 163 million users, and Japan came in third with 6 percent, or about 63 million users.
Obama’s Plan to Broaden Broadband
by Chris Willhite on January 23rd, 2009 at 10:00 pm EDT - 459 views
We all know by now all about Obama’s stimulus package that he’s proposing, you know the one that asks for trillions of dollars to get the economy kick started. Well, as it turns out, parts of the plan contain net neutrality proposals. The whole point of net neutrality is the idea that imposing limits on how much content a user can download from the internet is a violation of free speech, wether it’s filtering content or just buckling down download caps.
Well on Thursday the House of Representatives started working on the $37 billion plan to stimulate technology related portions of the economy. About 25% of the funding will go to rural areas that do not have broadband service, the other 75% will go to helping underdeveloped areas that have broadband but services that lagg behind.
What the plan really calls for is that instead of internet service providers limiting access to their networks, they will instead get a good boost of funding if they increase their broadband services and capacity. You can think of it as an interstate that’s quite busy and instead of having a law where people can only drive so often on that road, you just put in more lanes.
Category: General, Industry News, Online
Tags: broadband, net, neutrality, Obama, stimulus